White Rivers Media — building the business, not just the work.

Every prior step had been about the work getting better and bigger. I wanted to test a different muscle — owning partnerships and new business at a fast-moving independent agency, where growth is personal and there’s nowhere to hide.

How an agency actually grows: building senior client relationships from scratch, opening doors, turning partnerships into revenue. Marketing as a business-development problem, not a creative one.

This is where ‘marketing’ and ‘business’ fully merged in my head. I stopped seeing growth as the reward for good work and started seeing it as a thing you engineer deliberately — a lesson I’d use later to tie brand tracking to a P&L at board level.

Owning growth made me ready for the biggest agency mandate of all: build and lead a whole unit. That was The Glitch.